My Flirtation with Crime

Charlie's Cut-Rate-Store c 1970sThis is Charlie’s Cut-Rate-Store in Advance, more commonly known to townsfolk as Charlie’s Drug Store.

The building with the barber pole is where my grandfather, Roy E. Welch, had his liquor store. Dad had a small office between the barber shop and the liquor store. I’m sure Mother had something to do with seeing the town’s teenagers had a hangout in the basement. I mentioned that I still have some wooden “funeral home” chairs from there that I use today.

Crime spree was short-lived

Prather Building Advance c 1974_34

Once day when I was about four or five, I sauntered down to Charlie’s for an ice cream cone.

The ice cream was probably still dripping off my chin when Charlie paid my grandfather a visit. He handed over a counter check filled with my crayon scribbles that I had used for payment.

My excuse was that I had seen customers scribble on the checks, then Grandfather would hand over a bottle of whiskey. I figured if it worked for booze, then it should be OK for ice cream cones, too.

My grandfather made restitution and Charlie agreed not to call the town constable to haul me off to whatever passed as a hoosegow in Advance in those days.

I came by my lawlessness naturally. Check out Mother’s escapade with slot machines when she was barely a teenager. It’s at the bottom of the page.

I Hate Cursive Writing

LV Steinhoff writing exercises for Ken Steinhoff 11-1960Reader Madeline DeJournett posted a link on Facebook to a Psychology Today story entitled “What Learning Cursive Does for Your Brain.” The story whines that schools are phasing out the teaching of cursive writing.

Madeline, a former school teacher, opines: “Can you imagine that they would give it up? It is a sad state of affairs, when our dependency on technology and machines cause us to abandon basic traditional skills like writing!”

“Good riddance,” says me. I started typing in the first grade or thereabouts. By the time I was in the third or fourth grade, I was a proficient hunt ‘n’ peck typist. I tried to learn touch typing by doing exercises when I got high school age and got where I can mostly type without looking at my hands, but it ain’t pretty.

Dad had the most beautiful handwriting you would ever want to see. It appalled him to see my chicken scratching, so he embarked on a campaign in the fall of 1960 to improve my writing. I had to do several pages of drills every day. They started out with curves and lines.

Then we moved on to words

LV Steinhoff writing exercises for Ken Steinhoff 11-1960Dad would write an example, then I would have to copy it for three lines. His letters weren’t formed exactly like we were taught in class, but they were like artworks. Mine were more like modern art.

Long about that time, I was in Pastor Fessler’s Confirmation Class. His standing Monday assignment was for us to hand in a 150-word summery of his Sunday sermon. That turned out to be the most useful thing I got out of Confirmation. I learned how to take good notes in my own personal scrawling, then go home to the typewriter where I would bang out exactly 150 words. Not 149, not 151. Exactly 150. I have no idea if he actually counted the words (or even read them), but it was a point of pride to hit the number on the nose.

Building a vocabulary

LV Steinhoff writing exercises for Ken Steinhoff 11-1960When I complained about the finger exercises, Dad gave me a new assignment: he’d write a word out of the dictionary, I’d have to copy it, then define it. My handwriting didn’t improve, but my vocabulary certainly did.

I found only one notebook of writing practice, so I suspect that Dad finally gave me up as a lost cause. I think I didn’t make an effort because I knew I’d never be able to write as well as he did.

How did my writing turn out?

LV and Ken Steinhoff signaturesI got into a business where you had to write quotes all the time. I developed my own shortcuts and abbreviations that probably nobody else could decipher, but worked for me.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across a box of my old notebooks from the late 60s and was amazed at how some of those scrawls transported me back in time. I saw a quote from an old man describing a big coal mining disaster in Southern Ohio. “It put black crepe on every home in the valley.” Even if I didn’t have a physical photograph of the man, that sentence popped him into my mind. He’s long dead, but his words live on in my notebook.

Probably the best answer to the question, “How did my writing turn out?” would be answered by comparing Dad’s signature with mine. (In case you can’t quite make it out, the second line reads “Kenneth L. Steinhoff.)

Sorry, Dad.

Escape from Cape

Emerson Bridge 08-187-2013_8293My escape from Cape didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped. Mother and I were supposed to meet a plumber at her trailer on Kentucky Lake at 11 a.m. to move a shutoff valve to a place where it would be easier for her to get at it. I stayed up late to get the van loaded so we could pull out early.

I carefully activated an existing 8 a.m. alarm on my smartphone to give myself plenty of time to do a sweep of the house for forgotten items and to have coffee and a bowl of cereal. When I heard her moving about, I checked to see how much more time I could doze before having to put my feet on the floor.

My phone read 8:32. Unlike Brad Brune, who operates on Brune Standard Time, I got the a.m. and p.m. part right; I just hadn’t noticed that the alarm was set to go off on MTWTF, and today was S.

Mother elected to leave me behind

I loaded up the car, plugged in my phone and iPad, wrote down my starting mileage and pulled out of the driveway. Two blocks from the house, the Bluetooth display on my GPS said, “Disconnecting.” The phone was doornail dead. I tried artificial respiration, but ended up pulling the battery and doing a cold boot. It came back.

I plugged the charger in. Dead phone. Since the Verizon dealership was within eyesight, I went looking for help. Matt and Kelsey gave it their best shot, but the office was in the middle of a server upgrade, so they were busy handing calls to techs. They essentially did what I had already done, but with better results. I was back on the road again.

Cell towers and “if only”

KY cell tower 08-17-2013 8304As I got close to the trailer, I glanced at this cell tower and thought “if only.” Will, who was half of Will-Vera Camp Ground, approached Dad in the early 70s and said he was considering expanding his park and wanted to know if Dad would like to go in with him because of his construction background. Dad begged off saying he was working hard to wind down the business so he could retire, so the project never got off the ground.

I don’t know if this tower is on the plot Will was considering, but it’s adjacent to the park, so it might have been. I negotiated contracts with two cellular carriers to put cell sites on our newspaper building for somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000 a month if I remember right. This tower would probably have brought in as much money for Will and Dad as a raft of trailers.

Where’s the plumber?

Goodbye 08-17-2013_8331When I got to the lake, Mother was steaming. Not a pretty sight. The plumber wasn’t there, he hadn’t answered his phone and hadn’t returned messages she had left for him. On the off-chance that she had dialed the wrong number, I called one listed in my phone and left VM saying that I was going to have to get on the road, but I would turn on the water so she’d be able to stay the weekend.

About 10 minutes later, the plumber called me, very apologetic. He had every intention of being there at 11, but he had been involved in a car crash that left him with a totaled vehicle, several broken ribs and some other injuries. I allowed as how that might be an acceptable excuse.

I helped her with some odd jobs, then took the obligatory goodbye shot next to a new sign Brother Mark had made, Niece Amy painted and Son Matt hung to replace the original that had gone missing.

About an hour north of Nashville, I stopped at a rest area intending to take a 22-minute nap before pressing on. I had scarcely started settling in when a young security guard approached my window. Wondering what kind of hassle I was going to get, I rolled down the window.

It turned out he was a nice guy who wanted to point out that he thought my driver’s side headlight was burned out. “Geez,” I said. “I just replaced that one in February, and the passenger side one burned out yesterday. Thanks for pointing it out. I carry a spare bulb, so I’ll replace it before it gets dark.”

I jettisoned the idea of a nap, changed the bulb and made Manchester, TN, before calling it a night. Tomorrow will be a better day, right?

 

A Summer to Remember

Steinhoff Kirkwood & Joiner offices on S Kingshighway c 1962Jim Kirkwood and L.V. Steinhoff of Steinhoff, Kirkwood and Joiner decided the summer of 1962 was the perfect time to introduce sons Ken and Jim to the construction business. I was 15, stood about 5’9″ tall and weighed all of about 112 pounds if I had rocks in my pockets. Jim was a year older, taller, but but more gangly.

The purpose of our employment as laborers was ostensibly to let us put some money in the bank. I’m pretty sure the REAL purpose was to encourage us NOT to go into the family business.

We did a lot of busy work, but we earned our $30 or so a week when a job was completed and all the concrete forms came back. Dealing with sheets of 3/4″ 4’x8′ cedar plywood that weighed almost as much as I did was bad enough. Unloading truckloads of the finished forms was worse.

When they came in, we had to use wire brushes to scrape off all the concrete still sticking to the plywood. Then we had to cork any holes in the wood. (That was the easiest and most fun part. I still have a big can of corks in my shed.)

Form oil was nasty stuff

SKJ concrete forms c 1962The last step before stacking them was to spray the plywood with form oil that was supposed to keep the concrete from sticking to the wood. It was nasty stuff and it stuck to us better than it stuck to the plywood.

While it was still dripping wet, we had to stack it like in the photo.

In 1962, 2x4s were REALLY 2″ x 4″ and 3/4″ plywood was REALLY 3/4″. Based on that, the forms on the right are stacked almost 9 feet above the gravel floor.

Notice how you can’t see all the way to the other side? That’s because the forms on that side are stacked to the rafters. This was only a part of it, too. The whole lumber shed was about 100 feet long.

I wrote about the night Friend Shari invited me to a pool party at the country club after a day of spraying form oil and wrestling forms.

Newspapering was more appealing

Mission accomplished, Dad. By the next summer, I had landed a cushy newspaper job.

Our buildings are long gone, now part of what used to be called SEMO Stone. The construction company moved down to Dutchtown in the late 60s or early 70s. Dad was in the process of retiring when he died in 1977.

You can click on the photos to make them larger, but I wouldn’t suggest wearing your good clothes if you want to take a closer look at the forms. Oil, you know.